Faisal Devji Early in July of 1937, a well- known Nazi journalist, Schutz- staffel (SS) ofcer, and adviser to Adolf Hitler named Roland von Strunk visited Gandhi at his ashram in Segaon. As betted a National Socialist concerned with the cultivation of a nations health and power, Captain Strunk was interested in the Mahatmas criticism of machinery and modern medicine. In the course of their conversation, Gandhi pointed out what he thought was the fundamental contra- diction in the attention that Europeans paid to the preservation of life: But the West attaches an exaggerated importance to prolonging mans earthly existence. Until the mans last moment on earth you go on drug- ging him even by injecting. That, I think, is inconsistent with the reckless- ness with which they will shed their lives in war. Though I am opposed to war, there is no doubt that war induces reckless courage. Well, without ever having to engage in a war I want to learn from you the art of throwing away my life for a noble cause. But I do not want that excessive desire of living that Western medicine seems to encourage in man even at the cost of tenderness for subhuman life. 1
Having expressed his horror of the hatreds sweeping Europe, the violence of Spains civil war, in which he had participated on the side of Franco, and even what he said was the overdone targeting of Jews in Germany, Strunk must have been surprised to hear that Gandhi was in some ways even more contemptuous of life than Hitler. For the Mahatmas desire to learn from the reckless courage of European warfare was not in the least premised on the need to protect ones own life or indeed the lives of ones countrymen, racial brothers, or partners in Public Culture 23:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-1162021 Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press D O X A A T L A R G E 1. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Interview to Capt. Strunk, Harijan, 3 July 1937, in The Col- lected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book CD-ROM) (hereafter CWMG- EB) (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999), 71:406. Public Culture 2 7 0 civilization, as was true of both the Nazis and their enemies. In fact, Gandhi was clear that justifying war by taking life in order to save it could in no sense be considered rational. What the Mahatma found disturbing, in other words, was not that an inordinate concern with preserving life stood opposed to its casual disposal in battle but rather that one led to the other in a way that makes the love of life itself guilty of the desire for death. Only by giving up the thirst for life that was represented in modern war and medicine alike, he suggested, could the urge to kill be tamed. From the kind of subhuman life that modern medicine sacriced in its vivi- sections, to men and women rendered subhuman and thus available for fas- cisms killing machines, Gandhi blamed humanity, or at least its denition in terms of life as an absolute value, for the massive scale of modern violence. And this allowed him not only to put the Nazis in the same category as their enemies as far as the espousal of such a value was concerned but also to hold humanitar- ians and pacists equally responsible for its violence. Indeed, in some ways those dedicated to the cause of peace and humanity were even more culpable than the rest, if only because they might value life in far greater measure than others did who were at least willing to sacrice it in war. For in the very recklessness of this sacrice the Mahatma saw the possibility of going beyond and even destroying life as an absolute value. The kind of violence that entailed risking ones life, in other words, was capable of providing an opening for nonviolence, something that preventing war in the name of lifes sanctity never could. And this was why, from those parts of European warfare that still involved such risk, Gandhi wanted to learn the art of throwing ones life away. As if convinced by the Mahatmas words, Strunk died in Germany a few months later, the casualty of an old- fashioned duel fought with pistols, an event that resulted in Hitlers banning the custom altogether. It was only by refusing to treat life as an absolute value that Gandhi was able to accomplish his aim and spiritualize politics, for he thought that as long as life remained its basis, political action could never answer to moral principles. After all, the desire to preserve life was something that all political actors shared and therefore no moral principles could be drawn from it, these having been reduced merely to second- order justications for valuing some lives over others. The cour- age of a Nazi, for instance, would be deemed in this way to possess less value than that displayed by an American or Russian soldier ghting him, since it was dedicated to taking life for an immoral cause. However, the paradoxical thing about the Mahatmas glorication of sacrice in the name of an ideal rather than The Paradox of Nonviolence 2 7 1 a gross reality such as life is that its rejection of this reality as an absolute value also entailed protecting it. Only by disdaining life could it be saved, while even politics in its most sacricial forms, including the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, continued to be devoted to its preservation. Gandhi went further than asking people not to love life, if only because he wanted them to love death more. Thus in his response to a letter from Bengal describing the exodus of Hindus from what had in 1947 become East Pakistan, he claimed that by loving death those in peril could avoid the cowardice that might save their lives but leave them consumed by shame and the consequent hatred of Muslims that was meant to atone for it: Man does not live but to escape death. If he does so, he is advised not to do so. He is advised to learn to love death as well as life, if not more so. A hard saying, harder to act up to, one may say. Every worthy act is dif- cult. Ascent is always difcult. Descent is easy and often slippery. Life becomes liveable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as an enemy. To conquer lifes temptations, summon death to your aid. In order to postpone death a coward surrenders honour, wife, daughter and all. A courageous man prefers death to the surrender of self- respect. 2
A life devoted solely to self- preservation, in other words, would not be one worth living. Though he was willing to tolerate spectacles of sacricial destruction, Gandhi did not pay as much attention to such events in places like Stalingrad, Dresden, or Hiroshima as did the politicians did who waged war in the name of life. Instead, his disregard for life in the name of principles took far more quoti- dian forms. So during the time he spent in Noakhali just before the partition of British India, trying to make possible the return of Hindu refugees, the Mahatma repeatedly forbade private persons and charitable organizations to render them help. In doing so he meant to compel the Muslim League government of Bengal to fulll its responsibilities in caring for this displaced and terrorized population, while at the same time teaching the latter to behave as the citizens of a democ- racy yet to be born. Nirmal Kumar Bose, in his luminous account of Gandhis days in Calcutta and Noakhali during this period, makes it abundantly clear that the Mahatmas concerns were in fact not humanitarian at all but political, since it was in politics that the root of violence, as well as its potential for conversion, was lodged: 2. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Death Courageous or Cowardly, Harijan, 30 November 1947, in CWMG- EB, 97:373. Public Culture 2 7 2 But, in spite of the magnitude of material damage, Gandhiji was more concerned about the political implications of the riots. Later on, he told me one day that he knew, in any war brutalities were bound to take place: war was a brutal thing. He was therefore not so much concerned about the actual casualties or the extent of material damage, but in discovering the political intentions working behind the move and the way of combating them successfully. . . . The conversation with some friends who had come on behalf of the Gita Press of Gorakhpur had more than a usual interest. They came with an offer of blankets worth a lac of rupees for distribution among the evacuees. But Gandhiji wished them to hold back the gift for the present. He said, it was the duty of the Government to provide warm covering, and it was within the rights of the evacuees to press their demand. If the Gov- ernment failed, and confessed that it had not resources enough, then only could private organizations step in to help the evacuees. Unless the people were conscious of their political rights and knew how to act in a crisis, democracy can never be built up. . . .
. . . Gandhiji dealt with the problem as a whole and explained that we should proceed in such a manner that the Government might be put in the wrong and the struggle lifted to the necessary political plane. Whatever steps had to be taken, whether it was relief or migration, should be taken only after the Government had been made to confess that they were unable to do anything more for the sufferers, or had failed to restrain the rowdy Muslim elements. If, in the meantime, which he hoped would not be more than a week or so, a few of the sufferers died of exposure, he was hard- hearted enough (main nirday hun) not to be deected from his course by such events. The whole struggle had to be lifted to the political plane; mere humanitarian relief was not enough, for it would fail to touch the root of the problem. 3 My purpose in quoting Boses text so extensively is not only to show that Gandhis politics of nonviolence was as far removed as it could possibly be from humani- tarianism and its cult of victims but also to demonstrate how it was that his ide- alism was the least idealistic of theories. So his response to suffering was not in the rst instance to ameliorate it but instead to make sure that those who had been wronged behaved like moral agents and not victims, thus allowing them to enter into a political relationship with their persecutors. These people, after all, were themselves in need of a moral transformation, for which their victims were 3. Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1999), 43, 66, 87 88. The Paradox of Nonviolence 2 7 3 to be made responsible, preferably without the intervention of any third party. If the spiritualization of politics meant anything, it was this eminently realistic dedication to an ideal that took precedence over lifes own reality. And in fact the nihilistic or even apocalyptic elements in modern politics all seem to derive from the fears of those who value life either in its weightiest forms, as represented by the survival of nations, races, and even species, or in its lightest and most impov- erished ones, such as the desire to safeguard ones prot, lifestyle, or well- being, both forms part of the same continuum. For it is the fear of this value being threat- ened that makes possible a defensive politics with no limits as far as its violence is concerned. When in 1947 he was asked to express his opinion on what might go into a report for the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which was to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Gandhi rejected the whole idea of inalienable rights. Chief among these, of course, was the right to life, which like all other rights the Mahatma would make dependent on duties instead, since these had nothing passive about them and involved dealing with violence in an effort to convert it. Indeed, it was precisely in violence that Gandhi claimed to discover the possibility of its overcoming, something that the great revolutionary gures of the past two centuries had always maintained, though none in Gandhis intensely moral if also idiosyncratic way. It was the moral relationship between enemies as much as between friends that created rights, which meant that such relationships had to be emphasized and not what the Mahatma considered the deeply suspect ideal of life as an absolute value. It might be appropriate, then, to conclude this essay with a passage from Gandhis letter to Julian Huxley, the rst director of the United Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), condemning the rights of man: I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to dene the duties of man and woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be rst performed. Every other right can be shown to be usurpa- tion hardly worth ghting for. I wonder if it is too late to revise the idea of dening the rights of man apart from his duty. 4
4. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Letter to Julian Huxley, May 25, 1947, in CWMG- EB, 95:137. Public Culture 2 74 If Gandhis vision of nonviolence is to be taken at all seriously today, we ought to acknowledge that one of the great challenges facing its proponents is to think about what a citizenship of the world might look like that does not invoke the rights of man as its justication. Nothing, surely, could be more revolutionary than such a task, which remains to be accomplished in a time marked by the end of revolutions.